The McDoon family is somehow related with Yount and in the course of the novel we will find quite a few details about that, but here I just want to mention that some humans have the capacity of perceiving Yount, capability which is related with the "ansible" technology the people there use to keep track of far away, inter-worlds travelers, and which seems to run in families.

Various gizmos are provided to allow them to function amid the alien corn, and they are provided with a handy widget called the "ansible," a piece of technology we should all have because it allows for instantaneous transmission of information, thus canceling out the delaying effects of the fourth dimension.

Her science fiction is great too, and she is undoubtedly an icon of the genre; I love the fact that, forty years after she invented the ansible, other authors still use the devices in their books, even borrowing the same technological constraints that Le Guin used, as if ansibles were somehow a common heritage of all scifi universes.